Wednesday 24 March 2021

Rob Schackne #5 - The Work

The Work

           for Tie Wu

Let me hold this brush
and I will remember
the drops of water

upon the white paper
watch the water strokes
disappear like Spring

let me hold my breath
a cloud begins to form
I remember emptiness

how it looked before
the way it later was
let me do this again

Tuesday 23 March 2021

Nunggak Semi: A tribute book to Iman Budhi Santosa

To commemorate 100 days of Iman Budhi Santosa's death (one of the Flying Island poets), a group of poets and writers in Yogyakarta lauches a tribute book entitled Nunggak Semi: Dunia Iman Budhi Santosa (Nunggak Semi: The world of Iman Budhi Santosa). With the contributions from eighty five poets, playwrights, painters, journalist, editors, and academicians, this book compiles various anecdotes, memories, response poems, and academic analysis of Iman Budhi's life and works. 

The book also includes chapters written by Kit Kelen - the series editor of Flying Island Pocket Poets and Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang, the translator for IBS' poems to English. 



After reading Kit's these flying islands 


and misreading Hornbill for Hornball (Kit's poems flow quickly, like the stream that has appeared in our garden) and Hornbills have a rasping sound a little like cicadas)

Poem written 2019. 'Sail on’ Wolf and Gina


The hornbill observation station         The Straits of Malacca   

 

They are seated stoned, gazing on blue vibrations

inlaid with shallow mirrors. The tireless tide

is backing off from torn mangrove transitions.

 

They are not yet intimate with lives around them,

200 species of birds and 500 types of butterfly

or are these redundancies when love is kicking?

 

An old Chinese proverb says, 'knowing the names

of things is the beginning of knowledge’.

We are waiting for the Hornbills commuting to roost.

 

Pneumatophores spear through kneeling mud,

the first in South East Asia to spring from the sea,

inheriting tags like Langa, Langka, Langapura.

 

I ask how they live on this island that crumples cloud.

Wolfgang’s hand is off the tiller, moored his yacht,

lives in this row of dwellings called Purple Haze

 

and has found work as a sparky in the new marina.

Gina adds quietly that she works on herself.

‘I’ve given that up’, I smiled, most possibly a lie.

 

Unable to recognise a missed opportunity,

I flow with no sense of a transect, unable

to a quadrat over time and places, or

 

tally a discrete muster of people (named),

adventures, artefacts and unexpected

spectral junctures orbiting the circumference.

 

I talk travelling days, index wildest countries,

complain how age bullies me to safer harbours.

From having timeless fun, time lines my expression,

 

anxious that green threads unravel leaf by leaf,

tree by tree by forest, drop by drop, river to ocean.

I write, donate and occasionally demonstrate.

 

Wolf is Austrian, heading the opposite direction.

Gina is from Switzerland’s Italian corner.

I describe crossing the language border,

 

gardens abruptly sag and tangle, houses relax,

Ticino Merlot for lunch, arousing eloquent

laughter, contingent, unpredictable, infectious.

           

We’ve lost the destination Odysseus fought to reach,

home is a concept eddying in currents of the modern

that propel ‘a restless itch to rove’, as Dante put it.

 

I try to remember the name of the commune

we explored above Lake Maggiore, ‘Monte . . .’?

Where they abandoned meat and clothes, where

 

Isadora Duncan danced naked, Tillich, Steiner,

Lawrence, Ball, Klee, Jung and Kafka ate lettuce

and Herman Hesse lived for months in a cave.

 

A Hesse novel squats in their rented shack,

‘Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Glass Bead Game?’

They giggle. They have no idea, it’s in Spanish.

 

The dream of happiness is readily forgivable

but how come the future keeps failing the past?

Are many wheels turning? Are ghosts hungry?

A Wreathed Hornbill shoots the margins,

wiry frame clamped to oversized black wings

trailing the burnished goitre and solid bill.

 

‘Where are the rest?’ I demand.

I love her laugh, it’s fresh as fresh,

brief encounters need not be trivial.


Names are cerebral but absorb possessive breath,

a Black-hooded Oriole hooks gold behind us

sweeping out the remnants of blushed light.

 


Monday 22 March 2021

Ecology Collage Series...




 Ecology Collage Series
rewriting the order of the anthropocene


“Ecology” comes from the Greek oikos meaning “house, dwelling place, habitation” and logia meaning “study of”.

Traversing themes of art, literature, nature, society, technology, science and religion, Arthur Mee’s Children's Encyclopedias (circa 1960s) remain an unsettling testimony to the ongoing destruction of our original home—Earth—as they extol the virtues of Man, his paradoxical fascination with the “wonders” of nature, and his so-called omnipotent triumph over nature through the capitalist myth of progress. 

Upcycling both the imagery and the ideologies within these volumes, the Ecology series exploits the cutting power of collage and the magnetism of surrealism to invert historical hierarchies, rewrite the divine rule of cosmic order, create worlds within worlds, and collapse human-centric ideologies preserved in western art and literature.

these flying islands





these flying islands

 

gone like a cool breeze

 

frisbee free

strophe propelled

canvas a range of opinion

idea thrust

 

pastoral comical tragical

 

hello

find you here

in if you like

a conversation

 

that’s it

lean in with

tip till

keep a grip

 

let the string out

breeze take

beats tap

rarely rhyming

 

who will have the tiller then?

call a tug-o-war

 

climb!

take in and trim the cat

watch while

we let down ladders, many

 

sometimes it seems like a pile of islands

lift let

and there are becalmings

latitudes for donkey

mule

 

a prize

for the most beastly behaviour

allowances age made

here are the ruins

and blow me down –

the annual awards!

 

on the carpet

or took off by rug

come from the rope

and ever enough

down for the canvas count

won’t you look up

 

kilting

trapezoid!

Saturn high V

 

one bean for a cow and grew to this

pitch a tent skyward

fee fie on’t

sniff

 

not for profit

so let’s swap

I’ll show you if you’ll read mine

 

Louder

damn those hornball cicadas

 

islands are all second guessing

they are the dead flock

each go alone

above my nation

 

bombers have held a fete

 

call glissement

a capture of say eau d’imagination

or not

often as slap in the wet belly fish

come catch and toss again

 

time wasted!

not me off the hook

 

sail on!

and then the thousand years

sail of the line ride finest

 

little books for a world come ever smaller

pack fairytale

they’re seasonal

 

cast like coins two up

friends in the head

and many the tricks of presence are

wrought for the warmer world

so

blow me down

then a line gets out

sticks for instruction

mantra or an admonition

self to self

go go

 

toys and islands

in the bath once

was the whole of a harbour

storm safe

in the aeon till everything begins

 

you can take the machine apart

islands flutter by mechanical

wound as the heavens once must have in

 

a twinkle up for stars

never the same together but twice

 

see under them the workings

flowering all

come in a burst of cloud

 

propel the self as if by fart

 

or the how-they

pulleys sprockets

cogs rags oiled

toes grip the rung

 

slippery devil

then float free

 

ringside for angels falling

lit

and every weather

 

dance up in the air like this

others clear blue

and Christmas again

the Sunday month

 

I’m opening a door here

part your own mists, will you, won’t?

 

make births as from the undersea

and who will say volcano?

 

from all walks

many more in mind

 

sunk ones too

and islands down

 

someone hid a sneer behind

soon outed though

and back to task

 

we better a world as we go

make it up as

we’re here

we’re gone

ready or not

loose

and here we come

high as fast as who can fly

 

as is the leaf uplifted

a vapour trail and gone


 


Sunday 21 March 2021

 World Poetry day today

‘It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.’ WCW


Flight QF 2101            8.3.2021            Extract  

                                      Poem written on the back of the boarding pass

From the air, creeks reveal themselves, dark veins
draining the landscape, wandering uncertainly
a brief revelation before we climb into ribbons
of grey-white clouds, the horizon smeared pink.

Cloud free, the rivers and creeks are painted
with mist, some dendrite sharp, others languid
snaking. There’s so much water floating here
on the edge of the driest inhabited continent.

Now the sun positions himself to show the creases
in the wooded mountains, the land buckled,
tempting the word wilderness, but down there
lie scattered ruins of old tracks, rock shelters, sacred
trees, ceremonial sites, hunting grounds that look
so far away from up here. A wide valley spills sour
milk everywhere, small white dots, tombstones
are cherished homes, sheds or barns, fragments of
our immense footprint on the planet hard to realise.

And your absence is almost visible.

 

~

We were close to flooding our ground floor on Friday. Natural disasters focus you on the news. I have just read that people within low-lying properties in Bulahdelah have bene told to evacuate due to the Myall River rising. Thoughts go to Kit and Carol and hope they are secure in their beautiful property.

 


Wednesday 17 March 2021

3 New Poems Premiere on the Flying Islands YouTube Channel.

 


Three more terrific poems by Magdalena Ball, Clark Gormley and Steve Armstrong have been premiered on the Flying Islands YouTube channel in the past week.


You can watch them below.


To date the channel has 5 subscribers. 

Youtube will monetise once our subscriber count reaches 10,000. 

Still a way to go … nevertheless


Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel and please CONTRIBUTE your 1 minute (give or take)  poems.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuLG-cOnfd8


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xEHsihWweE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX994_T-GYo



Monday 15 March 2021

the Clive Palmer Monument

 


the Clive Palmer Monument

 

will be smaller than life

and careless thereof…

 

it fronts the museum of

where the workers were never paid

what they are owed’s colossal!

 

some say kitsch and some grotesque

something for everyone

dinosaur bones!

 

both thumbs up

loves a lie

things he touches turn to shit

 

the Clive Palmer Monument

features the pineapple’s raw end

it is less than a lawnmower    

or see-through Anzac

 

man that is cut down like a green blade

in his prime…

 

here’s not the Brahman bull

but steaming product thereof

served on billboards

 

and – while misboding – here’s

the missing pizzle part

(you’d need a microscope

that’s how fast he drives, flies, litigates)

 

really it is a hole in the ground

plenty of poison for everyone

 

the Clive Palmer monument

is being erected by the legal profession

(kind of a thank-you note)

 

It’s where ‘Midas has ass’s ears’ is buried

and there to this day the grass is singing

it’s all about Clive – always was and always will be  

 

trunkless              

makes great

the lone and level sands stretch far from…

 

General Clive’s drive

by the church called Saint Clive’s

statue of the sleeping Cross-Bencher

 

Clive is a one man rotunda  

a sun comes out of his nethers to shine

best of all

Clive is still alive

 

what a rascal!

delightful mischief!  boys own

takes so long to wipe up there

 

the tropics their own monument

why try to make any sense?

 

the Clive Palmer tribute is something

not quite biodegradable

was thrown from a car with much deliberation

a kind of minor trumpery, before and after that avatar

there was a time when you could vote for this

 

and because you ask me

I can confirm

yes this is all personal –

we call the highway Bruce


 


Thursday 11 March 2021

Rob Schackne #4 - Sappho

Sappho

Sappho   my exception
the first   female voice
just enough   the fragments
loud   all you left us
structure   of skeleton
lines you wrote   the missing
reversed   reflected   undimmed
this forever   on the outside
this sleeve   all these hearts
after sunset   the wedding
how much   you taught us
pantelos mikra   melaina

Wednesday 10 March 2021

4 bits that may or may not end up going somewhere

 

Goths are having a séance 

in the Cubby House at Bunnings.  

There are Skinheads in the Potting Mix.

Hipsters cook cow penises

at the sausage sizzle. Lowest

prices are just the beginning.     

 

*

 

Epistemological, Ontological …

I look these words up

every six months.

But I still don’t know

what they mean, not really.

Couldn’t define them if asked.

I think it’s something like

How do I know

that what I know

is what I know?

I dunno. Maybe if Noel Coward

turned it into a song  

I’d start to understand.

 

*

 

Her poems are never ending

compendiums of comparison,

like pin cushions for similes.

 

Yes, it’s a nice poetic device.

But you don’t have to detonate it,

like a cluster bomb, at every line

 

*

 

There’s a hobo living in the Big Potato.

They can’t evict him,

though it’s made of asbestos.

But he doesn’t care about OH & S.

Someone’s sprayed a dick and balls

on the big prawn

the big banana just got smaller

the big koala is angry

at the crowds drawn by

the big lump of coal

and the big jet ski

and the Big Clive Palmer, with

the café in its head, is looking shabby,

its eyes chewed out by cockies.

 

 

Monday 8 March 2021

 Kia ora ki katoa [Greetings to all].

Cornered by Coronavirus here in Aotearoa New Zealand, I wonder if any other Flying Islands contributors are Kiwi and might wish to share a reading, even if it is via Zoom...? Looks like we will be here for a while, despite escape plans being drawn...

Meanwhile a poem to warm everyone up, eh.

good old summer

summer

came back

with

a  HUGE  grin

s  p  r  e  a  d  e  a  g  l  e  d

all over its face;

a panjandrum

paintbrush

of lucent hues

imbued

with emollient

flourish.

 

its chortling

prodigal sun

flayed us all

i

n

t

o

happy    submission -

skin peeling,

smiles reeling,

balmy healing,

    &

a sort of

ubiquitous

mellow cadence

crooning through us all -

that winters’

frigid

casuistry

had  forced  us

to  forget.




                                    My daughter Pauline Canlas Wu - in Hong Kong - is the artist.


Te pai katoa [All the best].

Vaughan Rapatahana

Sunday 7 March 2021

standing still the trees: works on paper by Carol Archer


 

Archer’s drawings and prints celebrate the sense of immersion and wonder one feels when standing with trees. Meanderings near the artist’s home in the Myall Lakes region of N.S.W. and further afield have moved the artist to make these pictures. A preoccupation with light suggests the ephemerality of human perception. The viewpoint, towards ground rather than sky, underlines trees’ resilience and rootedness in ancient earth and rock. 

More about Carol Archer at www.carolarcher.com 

Wednesday 3 March 2021

myth of a-semism


 


myth of a-semism

 

there is no mark without meaning

neither made nor found

 

try to make nonsense

go on

 

those who set out

do just that

they have tumbled an ark into stone

they this that

here’s the picture of nothing at all

 

it’s tinkle whiff

the chimney slept

the life raft leapt

 

like lightning spread

clouds gone from the page

 

one day some one will cypher it

one day someone will know


Tuesday 2 March 2021

Rob Schackne #3 - The River






The River

Today he wrote a river
its eddies wore strange marks
on a flowing page, boulders
semi-submerged like hymns
the banks were huge, the plains
went on for miles of words
oddly discernible, then not—
balanced an enormous sphere
that was empty of meaning
overseeing the asemic, but
not nothing, not nothing there
a peace, a better silence
we wrote it together.

Drawing "Oggi ho scritto un fiume” by Enzo Patti (2021)


Hello Flying Islanders!

I'm very excited to have been warmly welcomed into this community and blogosphere as an honorary member after launching Steve Armstrong's latest pocket book of poetry What's Left.

I'm a poet, and emerging literary critic, living on Darkinjung country on the Central Coast of NSW. My chapbook, A Fistful of Hail, was published by Vagabond Press in 2018.

Here's a poem from that collection, which inspired the title:


Acrocorinth

You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed...

Psalm 128:2


Time has scalloped and tightly crimped

the hill's stone — all the troughs


and rifts of its flanks studded

with cypress, laurels. The Acrocorinth


juts into wind above the yellowed vineyards

and timber pig-sheds, the fish


like wands of garnet or black-spotted quartz

carving the shallows at Vrahati beach.


My grandfather's people

coaxed


clusters of bitter-and-sweet jade fruit

from the vines, while time – like a god's


hand on the hill – tapped off seams

of limestone with the rain's pick, or pounded out


trenches with fistfuls of hail, lightning.

In the village, pines drip


resin in the brush. I walk

dirt tracks where hens pace for seed. In dusty


gardens, in olive groves, the goats swank

oily beards, the hammered scrolls


of horns, gnashing thyme thickets — the Acrocorinth

pale as whey to the south. From here


I make out the old acropolis extruding

from the hill like blunted teeth; I probe,


till my eyes ache, for Aphrodite's

temple, nesting somewhere in the high


ridges. The Corinthian Gulf flickers

down a north-east road, and I know


this evening the sun will strut there like a peacock

trailing long feathers across


the water. Soon, I'll walk back

to my great uncle's house.


He'll empty wine from a barrel.

He'll tell me stories of his brother's fist.


I've seen the x-rays — my mother's

dented wrist, forearm — all the fractured


bones. And I'll think of those hands,

coaxing, on the vines; and I'll think of a god


with a fistful of hail. I'll drink

the cool, bitter pink liquid, and currents


of sweetness will twist

through each mouthful.


Acknowledgments

‘Acrocorinth’ was first published in Philament Journal — Precarity, Vol. 22 December 2016; and appeared in The Best Australian Poems 2017.

Monday 1 March 2021

a door in the day - for Lou Smith

 



a door in the day

for Lou Smith

 

none thought to lock

 

bring the bones

come flesh

 

do come in

you’re welcome

 

say I, the inhabited fancy

 

step through the city

take this pill, melt  

 

a fall of sunlight here

just where the day grows over

 

come seasons, turn

roller skates

 

prepare me a piano please

or any strings at all

                                                                            

not to show you

just to say

the only way

to make the door

is to open it

and step in